Quickies

A round-up of news items, columns, articles and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.

“They got their own security, they act like the police,” one man tells Lopez. “Anytime you do anything they say you can’t do this and that … and we’re saying ‘you’re not the police.’”

Sacramento homeless starting to feel like the 99% among the 99%.





Via W.C. Varones, Mike Mayo on Wall Street reform:

To fix the banking sector, should we rely more on government regulation and oversight or let the market figure it out? Tougher rules or more capitalism? Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. We have a purportedly capitalistic system with a lot of rules that are not strictly enforced, and when things go wrong, the government steps in to protect banks from the market consequences of their own worst decisions. To me, that's not capitalism.

It's easy to understand the appeal of certain regulation. If we'd had the right oversight in place, we would have limited the degree of the financial crisis, which included bailouts measured in hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of people losing their homes due to foreclosures. But we also would have sacrificed innovations in credit and a vibrant financial sector.

Call us crazy and we may be guilty of thin-slicing here, but we doubt that a 2,000 page Wall St. reform bill adding more layers of rules and regulations which can, of course, be gamed and which was sponsored by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, no less, will do anything to prevent any future meltdowns like we experienced in 2008.








B-Daddy has some thoughts on the Gibson Guitar travesty (um, not his thoughts, necessarily. Go to the link and all will be explained):

The recent raid of Gibson, however, did not come about because the wood was illegally harvested. Rather, the U.S. government alleges that the wood was imported in violation of an Indian export restriction designed to keep wood finishing work in India. To make matters worse, although the Indian government certified that the wood was properly and legally exported under this law, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service substituted its own opinion and reinterpreted Indian law. Its analysis suggested that if Gibson would just finish its fingerboards using Indian labor rather than Tennessee craftsman, there would be no issue.

(italics, ours)

Obama's War on jobs continues apace. Also, a loose and creative interpretation of the law can only be called one thing: tyrrany.






More W.C. in attempting to make sense of the past 3 years:

Biden: White House got its economic policy from Jon Corzine.

Religious advice from Jeremiah Wright, legal advice from Eric Holder, "green jobs" advice from Van Jones, health care advice from Peter Orszag, propaganda advice from Kumar.... I'm starting to see a trend here.

Rule 5 girl, Leryn Franco, Paraguayan model and javelin thrower.

Occupy Fannie and Freddie? Uh, probably not.

Sixty senators from both parties complained Friday to the chief regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that the nearly $13 million in bonuses to executives at the bailed-out mortgage giants were "wildly imprudent," as the lawmakers called for "substantial changes" to executive pay policies.

"We are sincerely concerned about the message this sends to millions of American families when the unemployment rate stands at 9.0% and the housing market remains very weak," the senators wrote in a letter to Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

[...]

White House aides say President Obama took a lead on cleaning up excessive compensation on Wall Street with the Dodd-Frank bill, but those provisions do not apply to Fannie and Freddie.

"The White House was not involved, and nor should it be," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday.

Let's get this straight: this White House sees fit to "involve" itself from everything to using tax-payer dollars to buy car companies to being "involved" in passing legislation that forces you to buy health insurance but they don't want to get "involved" in reforming, curbing, eliminating... bonuses at an entity (Freddie Mac) that will be seeking $6 billion from the Treasury Department after reporting $4 billion in losses for the 3rd quarter.






Assault, TB and lice outbreaks, rape, murder... John Nolte at Big Government keeps track of the Occupy incidents that the legacy media would rather have you not know, here.

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